Slashdot Mirror
Intel Launches 'Galileo,' an Arduino-Compatible Mini Computer
MojoKid writes "Although Intel is Chipzilla, the company can't help but extend its reach just a bit into the exciting and growing world of DIY makers and hobbyists. Intel announced its Galileo development board, a microcontroller that's compatible with Arduino software and uses the new Quark X1000 processor (400MHz, 32-bit, Pentium-class, single- core and thread) that Intel announced at the IDF 2013 keynote. The board makes use of Intel's architecture to make it easy to develop for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but it's also completely open hardware (PDF). Galileo is 10cm x 7cm (although ports protrude a bit beyond that), and there are four screw holes for secure mounting. Ports include 10/100 Ethernet, USB client/host ports, RS-232 UART and 3.5mm jack, mini PCIe slot (with USB 2.0 host support); other features include 8MB Legacy SPI Flash for firmware storage, 512KB embedded SRAM, 256MB DRAM, 11KB EEPROM programmed via the EEPROM library, and support for an additional 32GB of storage using a microSD card."
I know there will be haters, but the more corporate interest and entries in this category the better in my opinion. And if it happens to forward the interests of Intel, more power to them.
Linux is not inherently bloaty. The kernel and a busybox based user space run on hardware a good deal weaker than this. I love Linux for embedded systems. Its network stack is rock solid, and with the modern kernel it is pretty easy to get near realtime performance.
I've heard ~$60 thrown around as a number, though not an authoritative one. Lousy by the standards of Arduino projects that really are 8-bit MCU work; but the world is infested with Arduino projects that have the MCU twiddling a few sensors and then a (surprisingly expensive) ethernet/wifi shield bodged on to report the results to the internet. If that's you, the cost gets a lot more competitive.
Though, on the downside (similarly not-yet-confirmed) reports are that the arrangement Intel uses to support the GPIO is pretty limited, compared to much cheaper parts that do GPIO closer to the metal, in terms of the speeds at which it can bit-bang the assorted oddball peripherals (those cheapie LED strands for instance) that many arduino projects end up bit-banging to communicate with. Having a real ethernet and SD interface, not SPI hacks, is nice; but if those reports are to be believed, your project had better be doable without extensive bitbang interfacing.
From Wikipedia: "In a 1970 survey, the New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than 25 000 USD, with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least 4K words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or Basic."
It would seem this board meets the definition, as long as you connect it to some I/O device.
Intel didn’t announce pricing for Galileo,
Aaaaand I'm instantly not interested.
Seriously, you can throw as much hardware as you want at a problem, it's all just a matter of price. We could shove an iphone everywhere we want compact processing capabilities. (And god knows enough people actually do that).
Also, it really helps if it's open. The raspberry pi is neat because it's specifically useful as a full-fledged computer that DAMN cheap. It runs Linux so there's a lot of leeway with what you want to do with it. (Quickly, without having to develop your own RTOS and windows manager) But it IS questionable about what sort of long-term legs it has because the broadcom chip on it is very much closed. I don't care how awesome the hardware is if I can't even blink an LED without asking mother-may-I from some corporate whore.
While I like the idea of having an Arduino compatible board running Linux to do some more advanced projects, I don't understand what drove Intel to force this board to be Arduino compatible. The Quark processor is not designed for this sort of stuff as it has neither a sufficient number of GPIO pins nor any ADCs. It sure has a lot of interfaces (SPI, I2C, PCI-E, SD-Card, Serial etc.), but it lacks the things that are useful for a hacker project.
So they had to include a separate GPIO extender chip (over a slow I2C interconnect) as well as an separate ADC. The Quark SoC has some 15 GPIO Pins, the extender another 40. But of those 55 Pins only 20 GPIO pins are actually available on the Arduino shield pins -- the rest is used for all the Muxes to switch pins between the ADC, the GPIO Extender and the Quark SoC to emulate the flexibility of the Arduino AVR processor.
While I haven't looked at the actual PCB schematic, I think the board layout is also strange. The ADC is on the opposite side from the analog input pins, meaning that all analog signals have to travel a long distance in the vicinity of some high speed digital signals. And the GPIO Extender Chip is on the opposite corner from all the digital output pins.
This, together with the BGA devices (SoC, RAM), seem to indicate that this is at least an 6 layer board which will make it hard to clone this design -- something that IMHO has contributed to the success of the Arduino. The Schematic for this board has 27 pages compared to the single page of the Arduino Uno
It seems that this Board is designed more as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi than to the Arduino, both in price and in features.The Arduino compatibility is just some marketing thing which makes the board overly complex and more expensive than it needs to be.
But hey, it sure must be fun to employ a few million transistors and a full blown operating system to run the Arduino Blink demo :-)
X IMPRIMITE "SALVE TERRA!"
XX ITE AD X
Well, there is an Arduino with 84 MHz clock, called Arduino Due. It's 32 bit ARM, not 8 bit AVR. It sells for $49.
My little company makes an Arduino compatible board called Teensy 3.0, which is technically spec'd 48 MHz but overclocks to 96 MHz without any trouble. It sells for $19.
There are also other less compatible alternative boards, like ChipKit, Maple and Fubarino, with clocks speeds in the 50 to 80 MHz range, and attractive prices. Their compatibility isn't as good, which might be a factor if you're using libraries or code from websites. If you're wring all your project's code, that's less of a concern.
These boards also tend to have more RAM and other built-in resources.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
i did an analysis of the Quark X1000 based on the Galileo schematics, and the assessment isn't good:
http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2013-October/008979.html
the key failure is that there's absolutely no I/O multiplexing. given that intel actually designed the PXA series of ARM processors before selling them to marvell you have to wonder what was going through the minds of the engineers behind the Quark X1000.
the main points of the above link which automatically and very unfortunately make the Quark X1000 a complete failure are:
1) there's no video outputs, and the only options are USB2 (DisplayLink with no 3D capabilities and too slow to do video), SPI (for character-based LCDs) or PCIe. to match a 0.4 watt processor with a 20 watt 3D PCIe Graphics card is completely insane. there are therefore no good options for video display of *any* kind.
2) there's no "industrial" or "embedded" style GPIO. no CAN bus, no PWM, no ADC, no DAC. there's also no audio. there's not even I2S and there's certainly no SPDIF. so to make up for that lack you'd have to add something like a Cortex M0, M3 or M4 embedded controller... and given that those usually come with built-in Power Management, NAND Flash and SDRAM, for the majority of purposes where you'd need to use an embedded controller with a Quark as a GPIO expander you'd be better off, cost-wise, with... just the embedded controller.
overall then there really aren't *any* markets that this chip could be useful for. if i'm wrong about that, and anyone can actually think of good uses for it, please do speak up.